Area man still remembers a couple of guys named Pons and Fleischmann.

If the USPTO actually applied the required standards of nonobviousness and nontriviality, these stupid patents would never have been granted.

Unfortunately, their incentives are diametrically opposed to common sense. There is literally no downside for a USPTO examiner to rubber-stamp everything on his or her desk. They get to go home early to beat the traffic, while productive society is left to deal with the legal fallout. The net effect is to devalue legitimate IP while rewarding the trolls.

This, I think, is what really needs to change. Somehow, the feedback loop has to be closed in a way that incentivizes the examiners to throw out vague, egregious patents on abstract concepts.

No, Christians aren't to blame for the acts of personality cults. It's just a different exploit for the same mental bug. Fix it, and both problems -- religion and totalitarianism --- will go away.

Communist personality cults aren't atheistic. The leader is an explicit God-substitute.

Try peddling atheism in North Korea, see how that goes for you.

Wikileaks like to market this as shining light on the truth but in reality they are just revictimizing a company that was the victim of hacking and theft.

Karma is a bitch on wheels, ain't she?

I see this as no different than someone wiretapping publishing a family's private conversations.

Yeah, the Gambino family.

A matter of opinion, but if you think driving is "fun", you're probably one of the people making roads dangerous

You're the second person in this thread to post this rather odd and specific assertion, more or less verbatim. Who's paying you guys to lay down all of this astroturf, and how can I get in on some of that action?

It's not unreasonable if you can convince a judge to sign a warrant.

Otherwise, yes, it's unreasonable. Consider how much trouble you'd be in if you attached a GPS tracker of your own to a police car.

"No longer available in the US," according to the page you linked to.

I will say that's a really cool-looking spacey X-ray phaser gun, though. Tres Marvin the Martian.

Says the guy with his own 4 GHz computer, without the slightest trace of irony.

That's like saying to a software developer that he/she doesn't need to understand what memory leaks and segfault exceptions are, and how to prevent/fix them, because it's the job of the compiler to compile code in a way such that software never crashes.

And in a sandboxed, garbage-collected language, that would be exactly correct.

It's time for HDL developers to hold their tool vendors to the same standards that software developers expect.

But if you can't draw a K-map and cover glitch cases, just as one example, then you are not qualified to develop programmable logic.

Of course you are. That's what the tools are for. Nobody writing HDL needs to mess with Karnaugh maps, and once the tools get a bit smarter, they won't have to worry about domain-crossing glitches either.

*Wow, who is making the argument that we should "sacrifice free speech for a better society"? That sounds positively Orwellian. Or something from China, where the government runs a massive censorship operation.*

Read the comments in the NYT article. There are hundreds of them demanding just that. It's the scariest thing I've read in quite some time.

That's not a typo mistake. Sure enough, you are not intelligent as you think you are.

Not being very smart, I'll have to leave this word salad up to others to parse.

This gives me an idea, though. Perhaps the dumbshit programmers at Apple and Google should offer separate modes for their mobile operating systems: beginner, normal, and advanced. Copious text bubbles and prompts to explain and confirm various actions in beginner mode, some swipe actions disabled. Normal mode is similar to what is delivered now. And an advanced mode with more swipe actions akin to how keyboard shortcuts are used in desktop applications.

The "send my voice" feature is an example of something that should not be enabled by default, given the half-assed way it's implemented. Unfortunately, the centralized Settings menu tree is another weak point of modern iOS versions. Bury it in Settings and it might as well be lost forever. IMHO it's time to start associating Settings / Options buttons with individual applications again.

I'd probably put the "send my voice" button on an alternate keyboard or otherwise hide it. It's not a first-rank feature, and it shouldn't be in a position to be easily activated by mistake.

Sounds plausible, I'll bet you're right.